Crown and Glory
by etraytin
Summary: CJ Cregg takes care of her appearance; it's a requirement in her line of work. Going to the salon is one of the few habits she keeps throughout her entire adult life, but it's a habit that changes with the times. Twenty years of CJ and her hair.


Author's Note: Hi all! No time for a long note, I'm three minutes from deadline! This story is so long! Feedback is welcome, remember that there are only six more days in the Fic-a-Day! See yesterday's fic for details! This is an unusual story for me, hope you enjoy it!

…...

When CJ goes to work for Triton Day in Los Angeles, her hair is pin-straight and light brown, the way it has been since it first grew on her head at nearly eighteen months old. She'd experimented with it in college, did the unusual colors and one really unfortunate attempt at a Farrah Fawcett blowout, then settled on a rather severe wedge haircut that she'd decided made her look more serious and adult. She'd needed all the serious adulthood she could get while getting started on her own in New York. Straight, low maintenance hair may have been fine for a failing Senate campaign and fine for EMILY's List, but at a high-power public relations firm in Los Angeles, it is practically an act of rebellion. It shows no effort, which means either that one isn't willing or able to expend that effort, or that one is so secure that she doesn't feel the need to give a damn. CJ is in neither of those positions, so she finds herself a salon.

Before Los Angeles, CJ has never really been in a salon. Her mother died before CJ was old enough to experience haircuts as more than a necessary evil, and her father had no idea what to do with hair besides ensure that it was buzzed close to the scalp every three months to keep it tidy. (CJ loudly refused to participate in this ritual with her brothers.) She did her own hair, did hair with her friends, occasionally stopped in at a quick-cut place, but never at anything like one of the hair palaces that so liberally dot LA. The permanent wave she gets is an unmitigated disaster she will one day go to some trouble to expurgate from photo collections, but the experience itself is wonderful, so relaxing and refreshing despite the unpleasant smell. She goes back every few months and gets it redone, adding color until she's nearly California blonde. A tall blonde woman with a terrible perm in LA is obviously a publicist, while a tall brunette woman with a better hairstyle might be an aspiring actress straight out of Dayton and not worth listening to at all. She wants to be listened to.

On the Bartlet campaign trail, CJ has no time for sleep and barely time for showering, much less time to go out and have her hair taken care of. The perm falls out slowly and the brown creeps back in during the primaries, making Josh tease her about a skunk streak until she's forced to line his slippers with IcyHot as punishment. When they start attracting real media attention she buys a box of Miss Clairol and has Donna help her with it in a hotel bathroom in Cincinnati. Donna isn't even twenty-five and has perfect blonde hair with no roots but she does her best, reading the instructions through twice and insisting that CJ do a skin patch test, even though CJ assures her that no one in history has ever actually done that. The dye works fine, though Donna has a red-brown splotch on her wrist for a couple of days from where the glove slipped down, and CJ can go on television without looking totally ridiculous. Or so she thinks. The pundits say she looks very young and unsure of herself. They debate openly who Bartlet will replace her with for the national campaign.

CJ celebrates their election victory and her new Presidential appointment by finding a salon in DC. It's a little slice of heaven after twelve very long months, three full hours of pampering where nobody expects anything more intelligent from her than tilting her head forward or putting her hand under a drying fan. It's a company town, so of course people are talking about the election and the transition, but few people recognize her face yet and she can just shrug and say she doesn't talk about politics. She holds onto her loosely wavy hair for another two visits, until she is more tired than she can stand of being called young, unsure, a diversity choice in a staff full of men. This time she lightens her hair again and gets it styled into the severe helmet favored by elementary school principals and congresswomen of a certain age. It's quite unflattering, especially when paired with the drab pantsuits she adds to her wardrobe, and makes her look a good eight or ten years older. Some of the local gossips titter, but the talk about her inexperience begins to fade away.

She wears the hair-helmet for two years, or minor variations on it. It's not until the shooting at Rosslyn, when she goes on camera with a concussion and blood on her pants, when the media reports she looks "shaken and distraught," that CJ realizes she's playing a losing game. There is no point to making herself the image the press wants to see; they will tear that image to shreds just as readily as the real person. And she hates her hair so much. She softens it gradually, partially to avoid a press discussion of her new hairstyle, partially because her head is tender and sore for much longer than it should be, long after the actual damage is healed. For awhile she does not like the salon, doesn't like the hands of strangers on her even when they do not hurt. She lets Danny put his hands on her instead, even though she is angry and hurt that he cared more about the twenty-fifth amendment than he did about her well-being. She sleeps with him because she wants to feel alive, does it twice more to prove that the first time wasn't just a matter of being half out of her mind with delayed shock and fear. Then he turns down the job that would let her be with him without risking her career, leaves her standing in the Oval Office looking foolish both professionally and personally, and that is the end of that. She settles on a soft shoulder-length cut just a shade lighter than her natural color and keeps the old lady glasses for when she needs to intimidate the press corps. Somehow she manages to do this while hardly ever looking towards the left side of the fourth row.

CJ has a standing appointment at her favorite salon, once every three weeks to touch up the color, trim the split ends, have her manicure redone. If it's been an especially hard month and there's a few minutes to spare, she'll go for a pedicure as well. She's finally found a stylist she loves, a middle-aged woman with strong fingers who's been doing hair in the District for fifteen years and doesn't mind when CJ closes her eyes and doesn't talk. Sometimes it feels as though the only moments she ever relaxes are when she's getting her hair washed or sitting under a bonnet dryer with a head full of foils, unable to do anything but sit and let things happen. Even on the busiest days, she never takes work with her, and only rarely takes even a novel or magazine. She needs these moments very badly.

Trips to the salon are a business expense, no more a luxury than the computer she uses or the podium she stands on. It doesn't matter if one of the guys looks unkept or even unhinged, they are busy with the running of the country and the press assumes that they will occasionally pull an all-nighter or even several in a row without it being a national crisis. If, on the other hand, CJ looks even slightly less than immaculate at the 8am press gaggle, the reporters immediately suspect disaster. She keeps three spare outfits in her office closet, and occasionally laughs at the idea of the press secretaries who came before her, who used the closet for their winter coats and the flack jacket and little else. CJ thinks that if she wanted to, she could absolutely pull off the three-piece suit and tie look, but that would be a whole other story in itself. Dreary pantsuits continue to be the order of the day.

Three years in office pass and the reelection campaign begins. CJ has fought her way through a shooting, through the crucible of the MS hearings, through her own humiliation in the press room. Being knocked on her ass by an email message is both startling and annoying. So is her new Secret Service agent, who makes her pulse race even as she tries to come up with ever more creative ways to annoy him half as much as he annoys her. Simon is tall and intense, but his sense of humor is a sneaky thread underpinning his words. CJ finds herself wearing brighter clothes to work, gets her hair done just a bit shorter and redder on her next salon trip. Simon accompanies her to the visit, so she impulsively bucks routine and gets waxed as well. He waits outside the treatment room, but she can see the considering look in his eye as she walks past him. The waxing suits the new dress she wears to the War of the Roses, and for seventy-five minutes she's very pleased with the inadvertent foresight that means she doesn't have to worry about hairy legs if drinks go exceptionally well. But it doesn't work out that way.

The reelection campaign is hard. Her hair gets longer again, and it's back to the grays and dull colors and muted everything. She is okay with that. Burying herself in work and muted colors is easy and painless and causes no ripples, no process stories. CJ is absolutely sure that she cannot tolerate even one process story about her hair right now. But then the tide turns at the last minute, and somehow the American people come around, find their faith, and put Bartlet back into the White House with a rush of confidence and good feelings. It's a singular victory, but it's not the victory it would've been four years ago. Once she would've danced and drunk and screamed with joy alongside her friends after they won the election, now they exchange small smiles of relief and hope against hope that there's not another shoe left to drop on their heads.

The election makes her notice that she never touches her friends anymore. Sam is wrapped up in his quixotic accidental congressional bill and is hardly even around, distracted when he is. Josh, who used to be a steady source of casual contact, has been nursing a kernel of resentment for a long time that CJ is keeping him from the one thing he really wants. She wants to tell him that's not fair, that she is trying to protect him and Donna both, and that if it really mattered that much, one of them could get another job. The world is what it is, and the fact that she acknowledges it does not make it her fault. Does he think she wouldn't change it if she could? Toby, of course, has impregnated his ex-wife but still gives CJ occasional looks as though it's still 1987 and everything hasn't changed. That makes things awkward, and anyway Toby has never been much of a hugger.

During the time that would've been transition, CJ chops her hair short and colors it a deeper auburn because now she can. What are they going to do, not vote for her candidate? Shorter hair means more frequent salon visits, more time when she can enjoy human touch that doesn't demand anything of her. It's been two years since she last had sex, and the only hands she can trust are ones that she pays to make her look good, but at least she's back in the White House for another four years. She experiments with bolder colors again, and of course that's when Danny shows back up in her life. This time she is smarter, this time the pain caused by gunshots has faded. This time when the loneliness and need to feel alive overwhelms her, she falls into bed with an old acquaintance she barely knows anymore, then lets him jet back to France like she's the heroine in some tedious work of women's literature. Danny gets his story and leaves again, and the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach is smaller this time.

CJ likes her short hair, likes the sassy feeling it gives her when she banters with the press. She doesn't need the old-lady glasses anymore, she can quell an errant reporter with one stern glance without them. It's a style she keeps for awhile, all through the absolute disaster that is Ben (cute hair does not make up for absolutely incompatible personalities, even when they both have it), and right up until the madness of Zoey's kidnapping. Once again there's no time to relax, no time to care about anything that isn't the right now. The kidnapping is over in 72 hours, but the fallout lasts for months. Another Secret Service agent is dead. CJ attends the funeral on behalf of the White House because everyone else is indispensably busy. She starts growing her hair out again, almost by default.

Rather than scolding her as CJ had expected after four months of canceled appointments and root touch-ups at home, CJ's stylist is happy about her longer hair. (She does scold her about the touch-ups, which even CJ admits are subpar.) Long hair is very stylish again, and CJ gets a layered, ragged-edged cut with long bangs that doesn't look sassy, but does look pretty damn good. That works; she's not feeling nearly so sassy right now anyway. The President has been retreating in areas where he should be leading, a young man lost his opportunity at a life of freedom while she stood by helplessly, the government briefly shut down because the Republicans would rather burn the house down than see the other party living in it. A few ragged edges seem appropriate to the moment. It's this hairstyle she keeps as things begin to crumble around her, as John Hoynes looms on the edges of her past, as more frequent lockdowns raise the paranoia level at work, as Donna takes the place of one of CJ's own deputies in Gaza and nearly dies for it. Then Leo collapses, forgotten and left behind at Camp David like someone's exhausted cell phone, and the ball game changes completely.

The first days as Chief of Staff are like the bad dreams CJ had when she was worried about becoming press secretary. She has no idea how to do her job, but hundreds of people are depending on her to do it well, and millions of people are waiting with breathless anticipation for her to screw it up. There aren't enough hours in the day for her to become conversant with everything she needs to know, and somehow she still needs to look immaculate and deal with the press in her copious spare time. Her colleagues (her friends, sometimes her only friends) kid her on the square about how it's difficult and awkward to work for her when she used to be least among them, lowest on the priority list, always last to know. She can't even bring Carol with her to the new office because who would keep the press office running at all with both of them gone? CJ's deputies are good at what they do, but she's never had a deputy who could do her job because she did it so well herself for six straight years. They are writers and researchers and organizers, not press secretaries. Carol is the closest thing to a successor CJ's got, so she takes her goldfish and sends Carol back to the other end of the hall, trying to ignore the fact that she's hurting one more friend. Visits to the salon become even more difficult to schedule, and much less relaxing with her new and constant Secret Service escort. Looking in the mirror and seeing a dark-suited figure waiting for her to make herself pretty leaves a bad copper-penny taste in her mouth that she chases away by bringing memos and briefing books along for distraction.

She gets used to the job, eventually. Margaret is a strange but generally helpful figure flitting around the edges of her life now, handling all the small details like food and clothing that CJ had once, long ago and far away, had time to deal with herself. Margaret is a big believer in, well, pretty much everything, as far as CJ can tell. She puts feng shui accents in CJ's office, then presents her with a crystal meditation rock that she admits she could never get Leo to use. CJ takes it with a polite thank you, figuring at this point she won't turn up her nose at anything that might help. Meditation exercises don't make her calmer or more focused, but they do sometimes make her fall asleep, which is almost as good. The members of the press corps gradually overcome their separation anxiety and retreat to their usual haunts in the press offices and briefing rooms, all except for Greg Brock, who still drops by periodically to give her a hard time. She likes Greg's sarcastic humor and incisive mind, and she misses Danny when she can admit it to herself, so she doesn't chase him away with any real vigor. He becomes, if not a friend, a friendly ear. It has been almost three years since CJ last had sex, but she would trade her entire sexual future for one person in the world who will hold her and not want anything in return.

Christmas comes along, and the debacle of the China trip happens. CJ despises having to pull the trip from Josh when he didn't do anything wrong, but the President wants his Chief of Staff with him on this one and they can't both go. Being kind seems condescending, so she at least tries to be quick and matter of fact. Josh has enough other problems in his life to think about, though CJ has grown so far removed from the rest of the staff that she really only knows about his spats with Donna because of Margaret's gossip. Once she could've gone to one or both of them and been a friend. Now she is their boss and there are not enough hours in the day anyway. The President's reasons for wanting her along on the trip quickly become apparent once they're underway, but there's no time to smooth things over with Josh and try to explain what had really happened. By the time CJ returns from China, Donna is gone and Josh is following her out the door in an entirely different direction. She's sad for both of them, but she understands. The White House destroys any relationship it touches. Even Greg's marriage has failed, leaving him in the kind of pain that curls up around itself and buries itself in work. He and CJ will never be more than friends, and she knows this. It keeps things uncomplicated.

The President's health gets worse, even as he and Leo begin trying to cobble together some kind of coherent legacy for the administration to leave behind. CJ doesn't really understand it, but these are the two men she admires most in the world, so she shoulders up under the increased burden of day-to-day management. Her hair is going gray faster now, and in the really stressful weeks, it falls out in larger strands than she is comfortable with. Margaret recommends a multivitamin blend, and CJ switches to a darker hair color to make it easier to touch up. She really can't get to the salon very often right now. It is slightly comforting to know that Josh looks even worse than she does; he looks half-dead most of the time when he appears on television. The administration moves on, she hires new people to fill the holes, and then suddenly there is a disaster in space and everything she's built is falling apart.

Greg doesn't give her a heads-up on the story. That's what stings the most, at least at first. Danny would've run the story, any reporter would have, but he'd have let her know so she wouldn't be blindsided. The first she hears about the leak is when Annabeth enters her office at a dead run with Toby at her heels to inform her of the leak. At this point, there's little any of them can do except wait for the fallout. Greg does not call. CJ doesn't expect him to. She stays up late instead, watching coverage of the Republican National Convention and trying to remember if there was a time when she didn't dread coming to work in the morning.

CJ has a hair appointment at dawn the next day. Her salon is one that caters to women who work long hours, and she sees no real reason not to keep it. Some part of her still associates salons with relaxation and rest. No sooner has CJ seated herself in the chair than her usually quiet stylist makes some comment or another about the astronauts and what a shame it all is. CJ abruptly stands up and asks for another beautician. She gets one, because goddamn it, being America's most powerful woman ought to count for something, but she's probably destroyed her years-long relationship with this salon and can't bring herself to care. Her new stylist is nervous and chatty, and the resulting hairstyle is a less-disastrous version of her college experiments with Farrah hair, but nobody says anything about the sudden change. They're all too busy exchanging sidelong glances, wondering where the finger will wind up pointing. She keeps the style for two days, then visits a different salon, not as comfortable but very efficient, where they color her hair dark brown and return it to the straight, no-nonsense style that is easiest for her to ignore.

Being Chief of Staff keeps CJ so busy that she doesn't really notice when the comforts of life slip away, not until they really start stacking up. She gave up evenings on the town and dating a long time ago, but it's not until the isolation is overwhelming that she realizes she's lost the camaraderie at work as well. Sam, Josh, Donna, all gone. Carol no longer at the next desk, the press corps no longer a friendly enemy to sharpen her wits against. Then suddenly Leo is gone, off to the campaign, and Greg is gone in the next breath, off to jail for his convictions. She's still reeling from that, refusing to even register that she is the prime suspect, refusing to believe she's lost the President's trust, when suddenly Toby is sitting in her office, telling her things she doesn't want to hear. Apparently it's not enough that he leaves her, he makes her force him out, makes her draw the line and stand on it for the good of the country, and the feeling is like ripping her own guts out. And by now there's nobody left she can talk to at all, no respite for all this pain. She could book a massage or at least a manicure, some form of shallow physical comfort, but her skin feels the way it did after Rosslyn. Nobody is safe, and she does not want to be touched.

Work is safe, or as safe as it ever is, and President Bartlet seems keen on putting his mistrust of her behind them. There is more than enough to do, with the President only able to work six hours on the average day, CJ spends seventeen or eighteen hours putting out fires and making sure only the very highest priority matters reach the big desk in the curvy office. Greg is released from jail but he does not call and she does not blame him. His career in the White House is over, though he's destined for a Pulitzer and a wide-open road anywhere else he'd like to go. It wouldn't make any sense to look back.

Just when she thinks she can simply submerge herself in the work and not come up until January 20th, Danny turns up once more, a copper-haired bad penny she's never been able to ignore. He likes her hair, dark and choppy and poorly maintained as it is. She can't ignore him but she does blow him off, dropping him in favor of work again and again. Part of her enjoys it. He'd hurt her over and over, back when she was a lot softer, by putting his work ahead of her, ahead of anything they could've had. Let him see how it feels for awhile, let him come second to the job.

But Danny is persistent, and something about him has changed. He's not chasing a story now, he doesn't look at her as a conduit for the next big thing. He's come back for Claudia Jean, not the Press Secretary or the Chief of Staff. It feels good but it's also terrifying, because CJ has not been anything but her job for a very long time. She's not sure she remembers how to do it anymore. He says he's not pressing, but she can read expectation in his eyes and hear them in his voice. She tells him to wait and he does, at least until Election Night, when Josh wins and Leo dies and all the joy and sorrow chase her into Danny's arms and his bed, and they don't talk much at all. He holds her through the night and it feels good. It's not everything she's wished for; she can feel the same expectation in his hands as he touches her and knows there are so many things he wants from her. Even that isn't quite so scary as she might have thought. When he runs his fingers through her hair and whispers her name, she can relax and go to sleep.

Transition is strange and fraught, and somehow CJ never gets any less busy even as her job supposedly winds to a close. Or perhaps it's more that any time things threaten to slow down, she finds something else to do. There really is a lot that needs doing and nobody is taking it seriously enough. People want her to be making choices about her career, but the truth is she still hasn't even found a new salon she wants to stick with. She is not ready to be planning her future right now. Frank Hollis wants her to help him change the world through the power of a big pile of money. Josh and the incoming President want her to stay (though she's not a hundred percent sure about Josh, since surely that would be awkward in terms of staffing). President-Elect Santos is playing hardball, playing on her deeply ingrained sense of loyalty, telling her what she's going to do in a way that makes it sound like a done deal. She feels trapped, torn between Danny and her own desires and the needs of the country she's devoted the last near-decade to serving. It's Danny who throws her a life preserver and pulls her out, Danny who promises she's going to get better at whatever she practices. Danny who gathers her hair in his hands and kisses her, pulling a little but in a way that does anything but hurt. She makes her decision.

Even with a first class ticket, the plane ride from DC to Los Angeles takes a small eternity. CJ sleeps through most of it, waking just long enough to let Danny bundle her off to the condo he's rented for them in Santa Monica. Walking out of the White House really was like walking off a cliff, only the thing waiting at the bottom appears to be a bottomless ocean of fatigue. Danny is very understanding, even encouraging of this somnolent decompression. They eat food together in bed, and he promises that she won't have any jetlag at all when she finally finishes sleeping. He's right, too. She feels a lot better. They celebrate by staying in bed a little bit longer, because they are nothing if not perverse creatures, and CJ is on her first vacation in years.

One week after arriving in California, CJ walks into an upscale beauty salon that caters mostly to businesswomen. Nobody here knows who she is, but her clothes are enough to prove she belongs. A stylist sits her down in a chair and brings her a glass of mineral water, then asks what she'd like to do with herself today. CJ studies herself in the mirror for a long moment, then tells the woman to cut it short, one of those severe retro wedge cuts, and color it back to light brown. She's starting over, just like when she moved to New York. As she leans back and puts her head into the wash basin, CJ relaxes and enjoys it.


End file.
